What matters

I have spent a little time looking, once again, at what matters most to me, where my passion lies, what that one thing is that I would want to achieve with my life.

What matters most to me is seeing people grasp a glimpse of how amazing their stories are. Every one of us has challenges and struggles of varying degree to cope with, learn through, triumph over or even be overcome by. This is the human condition – life lived out in all its forms – the great cauldron or melting pot of meaning. If there is anything I want to say to each and every person I meet, it’s that your life is meaningful and rich, that you – yes you, are a hero or heroine. Your choices are the ingredients you add, and yes, they may seem to be bad ones at sometimes, but they are also those things – thoughts that become actions – that provide character and depth.

I’ve made bad choices in my lifetime. Some of those in the past resulted in a budget too far stretched and a yawning abyss of debt. But that has added wisdom. Through my mistakes I have learnt that I don’t like dealing with money and money doesn’t much interest me other than as a means of survival and getting the basic things we need and want. I have also learnt that because I am not interested in money and its management, I need to keep basic safety guards in place – like never owning a credit card and avoiding buying anything on credit if I can help it. As far as possible I organise regular payments to go out of my account automatically. It sounds boring, told that way. It is but a little illustration.

Yet behind that lies the agony of error – the guilt, the anguish, the desperation of trying to resolve the matter, learning strategies to pay off debts and finding that, at times, even that didn’t seem to work. There is the tale of unfair dismissal, unemployment, struggling to find ways to manage, to cope, to feed and clothe the family. There is a story of moving a family from one end of a country to another, paying off everything we owed and moving over the ocean to start life in a new country.

My story will touch a chord for many, but your story – whatever it is, will touch others too. Each story carries within it a seed, a potent ingredient, that might just be the spark that gives another struggling, fallible fellow traveller that all-important spark for life we call hope. Hearing how someone else struggled, maybe more than we did, so often is the one thing that keeps us going. It reminds us that we, too, can survive, even thrive, and learn to smile again – or in the midst of catastrophe, have that bright glimpse of a higher perspective that lets laughter break through.

These are the things that make our lives – the jumbled, wonderful, fearful, dangerous, ecstatic, traumatic heap of them – amazing art.

I feel as if I’m on the cusps of something, poised on the edge of a wave that is about to break. For years I’ve worked on my own perspective, battled through hard times and practised, practised, practised re-framing, searching for inner strength, re-evaluating my beliefs, my expectations, my ideas. One thing always rises above all else for me: where am I in my story? This leads to other possible questions: What journey am I undertaking, what mythical beasts to I need to outwit, overcome or befriend? Am I between places? Have I arrived at some great college of learning and wisdom? Am I present to teach or to learn – or both? Am I here to change the course of history, to calm, to influence, or to radically alter a deadlock?

Where am I now – as a write this? What will become of laying these thoughts bare for all to see? How might my story unfold? The closer I walk to my mythical self, the happier I am. I am a druid, a teller of tales, a revealer of treasures. Next, I have to ask myself how I can tell people what I want to tell them and how, for those who may be interested, I can help them discover the magic of their own amazing stories and mythical selves. Now there’s a question indeed…